Linux Upgrade!

Last time I tried this it went horribly wrong … there was some kind of problem with the system that caused all available memory to be eaten up like it was going out of style … and then it started chewing on the swap space … to the extent that there was no memory and no swap space available.

To add insult to the injury … my backup procedure wasn’t as solid as I had hoped.

The end result was that my system was down for about 2 days while I recovered manually.

This time, however, I had a absolutely fool proof backup plan.

Since my hard drives are mirrored (Using a hardware based mirroring device by an Arco DupliDisk), I was able to pull the primary drive out of the mirrored pair and upgrade that. If the upgrade failed for any reason (or fails … I’m not ruling out the possiblity), all I have to do is put the primary drive back into the mirrored set and run the software to duplicate the secondary drive to the primary, and I’m back to where I started.

So far, however, it seems to be going ok.

There were a few glitches because of software installed on /usr/local … and the MySQL database is screwed up for some reason. But I can work around those.

Once I’m confident the system is working the way it should … I’ll put the primary drive back into the mirrored pair and run the software to duplicate the primary to the secondary.

FWIW: If the iSeries had even half the problems upgrading that Linux does … it would have never gotten off the ground.

Update Tuesday evening: Looks like the upgrade was successful. The only significant glitch was a problem with MySQL. I had problems with the permissions tables that I couldn’t get resolved until today. Not entirely sure what the problem was … but I had to change my /etc/hosts table, restart mysql without permissions checking, and reset the database root password.

[tags]Linux, Fedora, upgrade, raid[/tags]

David

David is a Principal Software Engineer for PTC, Integrity Business Unit. He cut his teeth on the S/36 and has more than 25 years of experience on the IBM i / System i / iSeries / AS400. He primarily works in Java and ILE RPG specializing in cross platform integrations.

David has received the COMMON Distinguished Service award and was named an IBM Power Systems Champion.

David is an active volunteer with the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure fundraising bike ride. He is currently captain of Team RED Chicago.

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